Overview

Born from the fields of Islamic art and architectural history, the archaeological study of the Islamic societies is a relatively young discipline. With its roots in the colonial periods of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its rapid development since the 1980s warrants a reevaluation of where the field stands today. This Handbook represents for the first time a survey of Islamic archaeology on a global scale, describing its disciplinary development and offering candid critiques of the state of the field today in the Central Islamic Lands, the Islamic West, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The international contributors to the volume address such themes as the timing and process of Islamization, the problems of periodization and regionalism in material culture, cities and countryside, cultural hybridity, cultural and religious diversity, natural resource management, international trade in the later historical periods, and migration. Critical assessments of the ways in which archaeologists today engage with Islamic cultural heritage and local communities closes the volume, highlighting the ethical issues related to studying living cultures and religions. Richly illustrated, with extensive citations, it is the reference work on the debates that drive the field today.

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9780197793725

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Reviews

The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology provides a dense, comprehensive, much-needed overview of the state of the field. The volume is notable for its comprehensive geographical range, and for its ambitious goal of breaking down disciplinary siloes imposed by geographic and linguistic barriers.... This handbook will be an invaluable resource for history scholars, and it will provide junior scholars with an immediate, up-to-date, and relevant introduction to any regional archaeology, supported by an extensive bibliography.... Highly recommended. * CHOICE * An exceptionally informative reference work for the scholar and lay reader alike. * Tom Verde, AramcoWorld *

Author Information

Bethany Walker (PhD 1998, University of Toronto) is Professor of Islamic Archaeology and Director of the Islamic Archaeology Research Unit at the University of Bonn, Germany. A historically trained archaeologist and specialist of peasant societies, her archaeological fieldwork in the eastern Mediterranean spans thirty years. Walker is the Senior Editor of the Journal of Islamic Archaeology, Co-Editor of the Monographs in Islamic Archaeology series, and serves on the Board of the American Center of Research in Amman. She was granted the P.E. MacAllister Award for Field Archaeology by the American Society of Overseas Research in 2023. Corisande Fenwick is Professor in Late Antique and Islamic Archaeology at UCL. Awarded her PhD in 2013 from Stanford University, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Brown University and the University of Leicester before moving to London in 2015. She has published extensively on Islamic North Africa, and currently directs field projects in Morocco and Tunisia. Timothy Insoll was educated at the Universities of Sheffield (BA, 1992), and Cambridge (PhD, 1996). He was awarded a Research Fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge (1995) and was appointed lecturer at the University of Manchester in 1998 and was awarded a personal chair in 2005. In 2016 he was appointed to an Al-Qasimi Professorship at the University of Exeter. He is the author or editor of several books and special journal issues, and numerous articles and reviews. He has completed archaeological fieldwork in Mali, Ghana, western India, Bahrain, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda. He was named a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.

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